When Does Short = Long? ... Think Real Estate

Jason and I put an offer on a home back in mid-February. It was a home that's in "short sale" ... I didn't know what that meant until our realtor told us about it. In a nutshell, the home is about to go into foreclosure because the homeowners can't afford the payments anymore, but they owe more on the house than it's worth, so the homeowner applies for a short sale through their lender. They have to write letters of hard-ship and prove that they can't make the payments and why, etc. If they are approved for short sale, the lender agrees to take whatever the new buyer pays as payment in full even though the homeowners owe more than that. It ends up saving the bank money in the long run, since the foreclosure process takes about a year to complete and they would have to hire lawyers, etc.

I don't know why they call it short sale because it takes an f-ing long time!

Well, we put in our offer in February, like I said, and we just found out yesterday that the bank decided to counter offer us $15,000 more than our offer. What's up with that? This particular home has been on the market for quite a while, it was even listed a lot higher, but they didn't get any offers so they kept dropping the asking price, and dropping the asking price, until it appeared in our price range at the beginning of the year. So, I don't know what magic leprechaun they're expecting to swoop in and make an offer now, but I'm disappointed that we didn't get it and that we ended up wasting all that time waiting when we could have been closing on another house and moving in at the end of the month. Arrrrggggg!!!!

So it's back to the beginning. Jason and I are meeting with our realtor today to go look at 3 houses. Keep your fingers crossed.